Browse past isues
Help the mission
Support the mission
Get in touch
The vast expanses of the Argentine pampas (plains) saw Fr. José Gabriel (1840-1914) indefatigably ride his mule to visit his scattered parishioners. He started for them schools, hospitals, roads, post offices and railways. He died of leprosy because of sharing the local mate with a group of people affected by that sickness.
Poet, historian and journalist, Nicomedes Márquez Joaquín (1917–2004) is best known for his short stories and novels in the English language. Considered the best writer after national hero José Rizal, he was conferred the title of National Artist for Literature of the Philippines. In the centenary of his birth, the interest in his body of work is undergoing a strong revival.
Inspired by his Christian faith, Francis Canova (1908-1998) founded in 1950 the NGO “Doctors with Africa,” the largest Italian enterprise in favor of the health condition of the people of that continent, responsible for sending to Africa more than 1,400 voluntary doctors and other health workers.
First Catholic priest in Soviet Kazakhstan, Fr. Wladyslaw served 13 years of hard labor in a detention camp. Despite persecution, he went on exercising his priestly ministry without reserve, caring for people and serving them. On his beatification, on September 11, he was called a “courageous missionary of Christ in distant lands of Eastern Europe.”
Silver-haired American nun Dorothy Stang (1931– 2005), who was killed, aged 73, on an Amazon road, looked more like an elderly American holidaymaker than a modern-day martyr. Her death was the conclusion of a life totally spent in defense of the Amazon forest and its poor inhabitants.
This is how Jeremias U. Montemayor (1923-2002) was usually called since he was the first graduate of Ateneo Law School to become its dean. Born in a landed family, he sacrificed his position as dean to embrace the cause of the farm workers. He started with them the Federation of Free Farmers in 1953.
Fr. Daniel Berrigan (1921-2016), who has lately passed away, undoubtedly stands among the most influential American Jesuits of recent times. Priest, poet, retreat master, teacher, he however, is best known for his dramatic acts of civil disobedience against the Vietnam War and nuclear weapons.
Pedro Calungsod (1654-1672) was a young Filipino Christian and catechist who died a martyr in Guam in the course of his mission, together with the Jesuit priest he had followed, Fr. Diego Luis de San Vitores. Baptism had given him a new identity. He offered Jesus his life and, with it, his spontaneous loyalty and his ardent youth. The strength of his Visayan tradition found its purpose in his blood witness to Christ who had enhanced his humanity and given him a new freedom. In his footsteps, we remember the Blessed African catechists and martyrs Daudi Okelo and Jildo Irwa, also teenagers. On the eve of the fifth century since the arrival of Christianity in the Philippines, Pedro Calungsod, together with Saint Lorenzo Ruiz, embody the Christian faith that found itself at home in the Philippines.
Comboni Missionary Bishop Armido Gasparini (1913-2004) tied his existence to that of the peoples of the Horn of Africa. A churchman and a scholar, he passed away at 91, after spending 52 years in Ethiopia. His name still marks the social and cultural life of the groups he encountered. He was an accomplished linguist and his textbooks in Amaharic are considered an important patrimony of that language. As the first Bishop of Awasa, during the troubled times of revolution and dictatorship, he was respected by the powerful but spent his whole life at the service of the poor.
This is the incredible adventure of a humble Italian priest who became the founder of one of the largest Catholic movements of renewal in the world: Communion and Liberation. Born in a working class family, Fr. Luigi Giussani (1922-2005), armed with only the experience of the enclosed seminary formation, but with superior intelligence, was God’s instrument to gather the youth in the years of the students’ revolution. Notwithstanding his naïf approach and clownish face, he made them fall in love with the person of Christ, discovered in the warmth of the community. While spending his life mainly in the academy, he witnessed the mushrooming of his movement in the world He also was an intimate friend of popes. At his death, his funeral was a plebiscite.
